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Echoes from the Past

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In Nichols mind, the picture is clear. An enormous and sustained wave of human migration started about 50,000 years ago somewhere in Southeast Asia. Over thousands of years, successive bands of people spread out from the region.... See more » In Nichols mind, the picture is clear. An enormous and sustained wave of human migration started about 50,000 years ago somewhere in Southeast Asia. Over thousands of years, successive bands of people spread out from the region. They could move relatively quickly because they were coastally adaptedthey knew how to make simple boats and make a living from the sea. Over thousands of years, some carried their languages south and west through coastal New Guinea and into northern Australia, while others moved clockwise up the coast of Asia, across the Bering Strait into Alaska, then down the west coast of North and South America. evidence for this slow-motion human tsunami appears on Nichols world maps, where strands of languages sharing particular features ring the Pacific Ocean. Languages that start their pronouns with m and n sounds, languages that put their verbs first, and languages that use numeral classifiers form a pattern that circles the Pacific Ocean like a necklace. Languages sharing these features dot the islands of New Guinea, bead the coast of Asia from the southeast to the northwest, and trail the length of the Pacific coast of North and South America. using numeral classifierschance distribution or echoes of a great migration? classifiers are endemic, ubiquitous, frequent and striking in the languages of AsiaChinese or Japanese or Korean or Thai, Nichols said at a recent scientific meeting. They are not infrequent in Melanesia and New Guinea. And theyre found up and down the West Coast of the Americas, and nowhere else. This is one feature that genuinely seems to be found nowhere else on earth but in these areas. uses standard statistical techniques to calculate the probability that this necklace around the Pacific might show up on her maps by chance. The odds are vanishingly small that so many of the languages with these key features would cling to the Pacific Rim, while so few appear in the vast areas of Asia, Africa, and inland America. is frequently asked how the languages that form the Pacific Rim necklace can share these grammatical building blocks if they are not related to each other. She explains that the stocks they represent may have originated in the same geographic region; neighboring but unrelated languages often share a significant number of traits. Or, as groups of people interacted over time, they may have borrowed language features from one another or from cultures that had arrived earlier, a sort of cross-fertilization. Language stocks with several identical grammatical markers clearly share some ancient affinities, Nichols says, but its not possible, or necessary, to figure out just what those affinities are. evolutionary biologists have recently discovered genetic evidence suggesting that Nichols has uncovered something more substantial than mere linguistic echoes. Ted Schurr, part of a team of geneticists at Emory University in Atlanta, has spent years comparing mitochondrial DNA, a kind of genetic material that is passed only from mother to child, from groups of people around the world. He discovered a genetic marker that shows up in approximately the same Pacific Rim pattern Nichols found. interprets this match-up between her findings and genetics cautiously. She simply suggests that the genetic mutation Schurr found may have started in the same gene pool as the Pacific Rim languages. Recent research in China also supports her conclusions. Genetic studies there indicate that after leaving Africa, early modern humans colonized Asias southern coast before they spread north. See less »

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chinese, grammar, japanese, korea, language, linguistics, links

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Echoes from the Past

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